The Arab world's only communist state lasted 23 years at the tip of Arabia
From 1967 to 1990, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen was the sole communist state in the Middle East. Built on the former British port of Aden, it banned child marriage and polygamy in 1974 and achieved one of the region's highest literacy rates before merging with North Yemen.
Its story begins with British interest in the sea route to India. In 1799, during the French invasion of Egypt, Britain briefly occupied the island of Perim to block French access to the Indian Ocean, but the barren island had no water. Later, needing a coaling station for steamships, the British tried to buy Socotra; the Sultan of Mahra refused, calling it the gift of the Almighty to his people. Aden was taken instead, first governed from British India as part of the Bombay Presidency, and protection treaties with surrounding sheikhdoms grew into the Aden Protectorate.
In 1914 Britain and the Ottoman Empire split Arabia into zones, and between the world wars Aden's value soared as a guardian of Suez shipping close to newly found oil. It became a Crown Colony in 1937. Arab nationalism, spreading from Egypt after 1952, pushed local rulers toward federation: six states formed a federation in February 1959, and Aden joined in January 1963. A coup in North Yemen in September 1962, backed by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, inspired the National Liberation Front. Its revolt began in the Radfan mountains on 14 October 1963, when 7,000 tribesmen took up hit-and-run warfare against the British.
Independence came in 1967. On 22 June 1969 the NLF's Marxist–Leninist faction, headed by Abdel Fattah Ismail alongside Salim Rubai Ali, removed the Nasserist president Qahtan al-Shaabi in a bloodless move later called the Corrective Move. That path led to the Yemeni Socialist Party and a one-party state whose legislature was the Supreme People's Council and whose official creed was scientific socialism. It backed leftist movements in the Gulf, North Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
At home the state swapped Aden's colonial port economy for central planning, land reform and cooperatives. It offered universal healthcare, education and a basic welfare floor, secularised personal law, and its 1974 Family Law outlawed child marriage and polygamy. The country covered the south and east of today's Yemen, including Perim, Kamaran and the Socotra islands, until unification with the Yemen Arab Republic in 1990.
Source: South Yemen
